Who Owns The Internet’s Domain Naming System?

Internet Top-Level Domains

Who Owns The Internet’s Naming System?

Below is a news summary from the Benton Foundation.

by Katharina Kopp of the Benton Foundation

Introduction

In the past months, there have been considerable developments regarding the creation, administration and management of the Internet’s top-level domains (TLDs). Top-level domains such as .com, .edu, .net and .us have quickly become scarce resources, even though they are one of the key means of organizing and finding content on the World Wide Web. Any change in their number or in how they are administered has potentially significant effects on the structure of the Internet, its content and its users. The Benton Foundation and the Media Access Project have been arguing that the .us top-level domain should be better utilized to the benefit of all Americans, and nonprofit organizations in particular. (For more background on this issue, please see http://www.benton.org/DigitalBeat/db102400.html.)

This article summarizes the recent changes and plans for TLDs, explores how recent Internet governance issues might play out to serve the public interest and nonprofit organizations, and explains how Benton’s and MAP’s activities fit into that context.

The Debate Over the .us Domain

Last August, the Department of Commerce began proceedings on the future management and use of the .us Top-Level Domain. This proceeding provides a great opportunity to consider how to use this national resource more effectively. Benton and MAP have argued that the .us TLD is a national public resource that should be administered to the benefit of all Americans and not simply be given away for free to a for-profit company, without any return to the American people. Since we filed comments with the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Agency (see http://www.mediaaccess.org/filings/dtuscmmt.pdf), we have also held a meeting with almost 30 public interest organizations discussing the future of .us. One of the outcomes of the meeting was the decision to send a letter to the Department of Commerce urging it to hold a separate proceeding on the public interest aspects of the intent to reassign administration of the .us domain, as well as to prohibit Network Solutions, Inc. (NSI), the current administrator of .us, or any subsequent administrator of the space, from making any changes until the conclusion of that separate proceeding.

Since we sent the letter in February, Benton and MAP have heard little from the Commerce Department. We have requested a meeting with the Acting Assistant Secretary of Commerce, John Sopko, who is responsible for the administration of .us, but staff have informed us they will not meet with us until they have prepared a response. We are still waiting to see that the Department of Commerce treats the .us issue with the attention that it deserves.

The .us TLD registry is operated by NSI, now a subsidiary of VeriSign Inc., as a result of a contract that has been extended through November 10, 2001. Prior to this contract, NSI had subcontracted .us administration to the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California. Under the new agreement, known as Amendment 21, NSI is required to “use commercially reasonable efforts to maintain the status quo with respect to the operational policies, practices, procedures, administration and daily operations of the .us domain (except as may be reasonably necessary to comply with customary business practices and to minimize or mitigate risks),” unless otherwise directed by the Department of Commerce. We will be asking for an explanation from the Commerce Department what “commercially reasonable” means since this is a significant change in contract language which could potentially mean requiring registration fees and imposing other costs or restrictions on operation on .us registrants.

The Public Interest Potential of .us

The idea to reassign the .us for public interest reasons was first put forward by Brian Kahin, now a professor at the University of Maryland and formerly with the Clinton White House. Kahin drafted a proposal for the management and use of the .us name space where he argued that this national resource should be utilized to the benefit of all Americans by setting up a Digital Opportunity Trust (DOT). The trust would generate its funds through the auctioning, selling and/or sponsorship of .us TLDs in a restructured .us TLD space. The fund could invest in projects enabling the widest possible participation and access to information and communication technologies with the goal to narrow the Digital Divide.

While guaranteeing existing .us name holders their continued place under .us, the cumbersome geographic structure of the .us space would have to be reorganized so as to make it as attractive for commercial development as possible and hence to raise as much money as possible. The important principal here is that the .us ccTLD is a national resource, like our forests and parks and airwaves, and that the use of national resources for private gain should in some form benefit the American people as a whole. It seems that the most straightforward way to generate money is by selling, auctioning and sponsoring .us domain names for commercial use. Money generated this way can then be applied to finance projects that benefit society as a whole by strengthening participatory democracy, increasing economic opportunity and fostering diversity of speech.

As the discussions about the public interest potentials of the .us domain have progressed, another idea has been put forward, although it is less developed at this time. The idea is not so much an alternative to that of the DOT proposal, but should be seen as complementary — as an opportunity worth exploring in conjunction with the DOT proposal. The idea is to use the .us domain to foster some kind of electronic commons — a space for noncommercial speech and nonprofit organizations in the United States. It is possible to divide the space, for example, into subdomains (such as .com.us for commercial enterprises and .ngo.us for nongovernmental organizations) and thus have both commercial and noncommercial uses of the .us space. The goal would be to have a clearly defined and easily identifiable space on the Internet that is truly a home for U.S. based nonprofit organizations and noncommercial speech. The .us domain would guarantee and indicate to the Web user that the content is generated by a nonprofit organization or by an individual speaking only for herself.

Contrary to commonly held notions, the .org top-level domain is not exclusive to noncommercial entities. It was set up as a catch-all for all those organizations and entities that did not fit under .net (network-related entities such as Internet service providers) or .com (commercial entities). Anybody can obtain a .org TLD, whether a for-profit or nonprofit entity, and generally there is no enforcement as to who can and cannot register under .org, .com or .net. In other words, at this point in time there is no TLD reserved for nonprofit organizations or noncommercial speech. The possibilities to make use of that space and to foster noncommercial speech are manifold, and many believe that this is an essential part to any communications medium, especially one as important as the Internet.

We are just beginning to explore the many uses and advantages of an Internet space reserved for noncommercial uses and organizations. Many opportunities exist; for example, such a space could foster democratic participation by giving political candidates their official campaign Web site that voters could easily locate and identify as that of the candidate’s official site. This arrangement would avoid any confusion with Web sites where people exercise their First Amendment right to spoof a candidate. A noncommercial space can also serve local communities better and help to connect people with each other.

Geographic identifiers can help in this process. Part of the .us noncommercial space could continue to be structured based on some geographic system. In this way, chapters of national nonprofit organizations and local nongovernmental organizations catering to local needs could be more easily identified and local communities better served. In general, it would be easier to organize the domain geographically, so that all nongovernmental social services in a particular locality could be accessible through a community portal, for example. A clearly identifiable noncommercial top-level domain for U.S. nonprofit organizations and activities would also facilitate the development of a search engine with fair and transparent procedures which could also be designed to facilitate the identification of nonprofit organizations by location. (This idea was recently put forward by scholars from the University of Maryland’s Civil Society/Community Building Initiative in connection with a proposal to create a .civ top-level domain.)

Meanwhile, Recent Activities Bode Ill for Public Interest

On April 11, the Department of Commerce filed a notice of intent to transfer control of .edu from VeriSign to the Washington, DC-based nonprofit EDUCAUSE, which counts more than 18,000 U.S. colleges among its members. Contrary to what one might expect, the bid to run .edu was not awarded competitively but given to EDUCAUSE without any consideration of other organizations.

Conclusion

The Internet’s Top-Level Domain system provides an opportunity to both create noncommercial space and to fund noncommercial content on the Internet. It is up to policymakers and the public to ensure that this opportunity not be squandered.

Related materials:

The DOT Campaign: Making “.us” Work for All of US http://www.benton.org/DigitalBeat/db102400.html

Benton/MAP’s activities on .us http://www.benton.org/Policy/US/

Dept. of Commerce Notice on .US Proceedings/ Request for Public Comment http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/domainname/usrfc2/dotusrfc2.htm

A Digital Gift to the Nation, by Newton Minow and Larry Grossman http://www.brook.edu/press/books/clientpr/priority/digital_gift.htm

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Arts & Letters

Geonomics is …

a new field of study offered in place of economics, as astronomy replaced astrology and chemistry replaced alchemy. Conventional economics, in which GNP can do well while people suffer, is a bit too superstitious for my renaissance upbringing. If I’m to propitiate unseen forces, it won’t be inflation or “the market”; let it be theEgyptian cat goddess. At least then we’d have fewer rats. Meanwhile, believing in reason leads to a new policy, also christened geonomics. That’s the proposal to share (a kind of management, the “nomics” part) the worth of Mother Earth (the “geo” part). If our economies are to work right, people need to see prices that tell the truth. Now taxes and subsidies distort prices, tricking people into squandering the planet. Using land dues and rent dividends instead lets prices be precise, guiding people to get more from less and thereby shrink their workweek. More free time ought to make us happy enough to evolve beyond economics, except when nostalgic for superstition.

a study of Earth’s economic worth, of the money we spend on the nature we use, trillions of dollars each year. We spend most to be with our own kind; land value follows population density. Besides nearness to downtowns, we also pay for proximity to good schools, lovely views, soil fertility, etc. These advantages, sellers did not create. So we pay the wrong people for land. Instead, we should pay our neighbors. They generate land’s value and deserve compensation for keeping off ours, as they’d pay us for keeping off theirs. It’s mutual compensation: we’d replace taxes with land dues – a bit like Hong Kong does – and replace subsidies with “rent” dividends to area residents – a bit like Alaska does with oil revenue. Both taxes and subsidies – however fair or not – are costly and distort the prices of the goods taxed and the services subsidized. By replacing them and letting prices become precise, we reveal the real costs of output, the real values of consumers. Then, just by following the bottom line, people can choose to conserve and prosper automatically. A community could start by shifting its property tax off buildings, onto land – a bit like a score of towns in Pennsylvania do; every place that has done it has benefited.

a scientific look at how we divvy up the work and the wealth, how some of us end up with too much or too little effort or reward. That’s partly due to Ricardo’s Law of Rent, showing how wasteful use of Earth cuts wages. And it’s partly due to how a society’s elite runs government around like water boys, dishing out subsidies and tax breaks. While geonomists look political reality right in the eye, without blinking, conventional economists flinch. When Paul Volcker, ex-chief of the Federal Reserve, moved on to a cushy professorship at Princeton cum book contract, the crush of deadlines bore down. So Volcker asked a junior associate to help with the book. The guy refused, explaining that giving serious consideration to policy would ruin his academic career. The ex-Fed chief couldn’t believe it and asked the department chair if truly that were the case. That head honcho pondered the question then replied no, not if he only does it once. And economics was AKA political economy!

not exactly Georgism, the Single Tax on land value proposed by Henry George. He did, tho’, inspire most of the real-world implementations of the land tax that some jurisdictions enjoy today, and modern thinkers to craft geonomics. While his name and our remedy both begin with “geo” since both words refer to “Earth”, the two have their differences. (a) George pegs land monopoly as the fundamental flaw while geonomics faults Rent retention. (b) To fix the flaw, George was content to use a tax, while geonomics jettisons them in favor of price-like fees. (c) George focused on the taking while geonomics headlines the sharing. George envisioned an enlightened state judiciously spending the collected Rent while geonomics would turn the lion’s share over to the citizens via a dividend. (d) And George, as was everyone in his era, was pro-growth while geonomics sees economies as alive, growing, maturing, and stabilizing. Despite these differences, George should be recognized as great an economist as Euclid was a geometrician.

a scientific look at how we divvy up the work and the wealth, how some of us end up with too much or too little effort or reward. That’s partly due to Ricardo’s Law of Rent, showing how wasteful use of Earth cuts wages. And it’s partly due to how a society’s elite runs government around like water boys, dishing out subsidies and tax breaks. While geonomists look political reality right in the eye, without blinking, conventional economists flinch. When Paul Volcker, ex-chief of the Federal Reserve, moved on to a cushy professorship at Princeton cum book contract, the crush of deadlines bore down. So Volcker asked a junior associate to help with the book. The guy refused, explaining that giving serious consideration to policy would ruin his academic career. The ex-Fed chief couldn’t believe it and asked the department chair if truly that were the case. That head honcho pondered the question then replied no, not if he only does it once. And economics was AKA political economy!

a discipline that, compared to economics, is as obscure as Warren Buffett’s investment strategy, compared to conventional investment theory, about which Buffett said, “You couldn’t advance in a finance department in this country unless you taught that the world was flat.” (The New York Times, Oct 29). The writer wondered, “But why? If it works, why don’t more investors use it?”
Good question. Geonomics works, too. Every place that has used it has prospered while conserving resources. Yet it remains off the radar of many wanna-be reformers. Gradually, tho’, that’s changing. More are becoming aware of what geonomics studies – all the money we spend on the nature we use. Geonomics (1) as an alternative worldview to the anthropocentric, sees human economies as part of the embracing ecosystem with natural feedback loops seeking balance in both systems. (2) As an alternative to worker vs. investor, it sees our need for sites and resources making those who own land into landlords. (3)As an alternative to economics, it tracks the trillions of “rent” as it drives the “housing” bubble and all other indicators. And (4) as an alternative to left or right, it suggests we not tax ourselves then subsidize our favorites but recover and share society’s surplus, paying in land dues and getting back “rent” dividends, a la Alaska’s oil dividend. Letting rent go to the wrong pockets wreaks havoc, while redirecting it to everyone would solve our economic ills and the ills downstream from them.
People must learn to stop whining so much and feel enough self-esteem to demand a fair share of rent, society’s surplus, the commonwealth.

the study of the money we spend on the nature we use. When we pay that money to private owners, we reward both speculation and over-extraction. Robert Kiyosaki’s bestseller, Rich Dad’s Prophecy, says, “One of the reasons McDonald’s is such a rich company is not because it sells a lot of burgers but because it owns the land at some of the best intersections in the world. The main reason Kim and I invest in such properties is to own the land at the corner of the intersection. (p 200) My real estate advisor states that the rich either made their money in real estate or hold their money in real estate.” (p 141, via Greg Young) When government recovers the rents for natural advantages for everyone, it can save citizens millions. Ben Sevack, Montreal steel manufacturer, tells us (August 12) that Alberta, by leasing oil & gas fields, recovers enough revenue to be the only province in Canada to get by without a sales tax and to levy a flat provincial income tax. While running for re-election, provincial Premier Ralph Klein proposes to abolish their income tax and promises to eliminate medical insurance premiums and use resource revenue to pay for all medical expense for seniors. After all this planned tax-cutting and greater expense, they still expect a large budget surplus. Even places without oil and gas have high site values in their downtowns, and high values in their utility franchises. Recover the values of locations and privileges, displace the harmful taxes on sales, salaries, and structures, then use the revenue to fund basic government and pay residents a dividend, and you have geonomics in action.

about the money we spend on the nature we use. It flows torrentially yet invisibly, often submerged in the price of housing, food, fuel, and everything else. Flowing from the many to the few, natural rent distorts prices and rewards unjust and unsustainable choices. Redirected via dues and dividends to flow from each to all, “rent” payments would level the playing field and empower neighbors to shrink their workweek and expand their horizons. Modeled on nature’s feedback loops, earlier proposals to redirect rent found favor with Paine, Tolstoy, and Einstein. Wherever tried, to the degree tried, redirecting rent worked. One of today’s versions, the green tax shift, spreads out of Europe. Another, the Property Tax Shift, activists can win at the local level, building a world that works right for everyone.

shaped by reality. In the 1980′s, the Swedish government doubled its stock transfer tax. Tax receipts, however, rose only 15%, since traders simply fled to London exchanges. Fearing a further exodus, the Swedish government quickly rescinded the tax altogether. (The New York Times, April 20) That willingness to tax anything leads us astray. Pushing us astray is that unwillingness to pay what we owe: rent for land, our common heritage. Assuming land value is up for grabs, we speculate. We cap the property tax on both land and buildings and the rate at which assessments can go up; while real market values rise quicker, assessments can never catch up. Our stewards, the Bureau of Land Management, routinely sell and lease sites below market value, often to insiders, says the Government Accounting Office. Once we grasp that rent is ours to share, we’ll collect it all, rather than let it enrich a few, and quit taxing earnings, which do belong to the individual earner. That shift is geonomic policy.

a neologism for sharing “rent” or “social surplus” – the money we spend on the nature we use. When we buy land, such as the land beneath a home, we typically pay the wrong person – the homeowner. Instead, since land cost us nothing to make and is the common heri-tage of us all, rather than pay the owner, we should pay ourselves, our neighbors, our community. That is, we should all pay land dues to the public treasury, then our government would pay us land dividends from this collected revenue. It’s similar to the Alaska oil dividend, almost $2,000 last year. Indeed, the annual rental value of land, oil, all other natural resources, including the broadcast spectrum and other government-granted permits such as corporate charters, totals several trillion dollars each year. It’s so much that some could be spent on basic social services, the rest parceled out as a divi-dend, as Tom Paine suggested, and taxes (except any on natural rents) could be abolished, as Thomas Jeffer-son suggested. Were we sharing Earth by sharing her worth, territorial disputes would be fewer, less intense, and more resolvable.